MARK YOUR CALENDARS! Join us on Sept. 21, 2018, International Peace Day, for an evening of reflection on five years of Campaign Nonviolence and the next steps forward, with George Martin, Rev. John Dear, Kathy Kelly, Rev. Lennox Yearwood (invited), Shane Claiborne, Dr. Ken Butigan & Dr. Kit Evans-Ford, and on Sat. Sept. 22, 2018, for a legal rally and a nonviolent silent march from the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue to the White House for a rally and nonviolent direct action.

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The night before he was killed, he told the crowd in Memphis, “The choice is no longer violence or nonviolence; it’s nonviolence or non-existence.”

Fifty years later, we are struggling more than ever between nonviolence or non-existence. Through our Campaign Nonviolence National Week of Action every September, tens of thousands of us have chosen nonviolence. Join us this September in Washington, D.C. to reflect on how we can help the nation and the world reject violence and “non-existence” and choose active nonviolence as the only positive way forward.

SCHEDULE OF MAIN EVENTS

Friday evening, September 21, 2018
Campaign Nonviolence will host an evening gathering to reflect and share stories on the Campaign Nonviolence movement, our next steps, and our work to help end racism, poverty, war, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and to promote a new culture of peace and nonviolence—how we can help the nation and the world reject violence and “non-existence” and choose active nonviolence as the only way forward.

Earlier that afternoon, CNV will offer a nonviolence training, at the Festival Center, with Ken Butigan and Pace e Bene’s international trainer Veronica Pelicaric (right) from 4-5:30 p.m. (More details to come)

The Potter’s House bookstore and restaurant, located next to the Festival Center, will be available for dinner.

Saturday morning, September 22, 2018
We will gather at 9:00am at the Statue of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Southside of the Lincoln Memorial, near the Jefferson reflecting pond, for a legal rally with speakers and music.

Then we will line up in pairs, hold signs with slogans, and walk in strict silence from the Dr. King statue, passed the Lincoln Memorial, to Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, where we will hold a legal vigil standing in silence holding our signs.

In our silent procession, we will choose nonviolence over non-existence, and inspire us to build a global Campaign Nonviolence, for the abolition of war, poverty, racism, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and for the coming of a new culture of peace and nonviolence.

While some keep legal vigil, a few may engage in nonviolent direct action.

Together, in a spirit of nonviolence, we will take our message to the White House, call for an end to racism, poverty, war, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and for a new culture of peace and nonviolence.

Registration and Fees

Both the Friday and Saturday events are free and all are encouraged to attend. A suggested donation of $15 will be requested during the Friday gathering, but is not required.

Registration is not required for either event, however if you do plan to attend we encourage you to let us know by filling out the form on the right. For more information, contact Ryan Hall at Pace e Bene, at info@paceebene.org

All lodging and transportation is the responsibility of the participant.

George Paz Martin is one of the nation’s leading justice and peace activists and national organizers, and a member of the Pace e Bene/Campaign Nonviolence board of directors. He is a former two-term co-chair of both the Wisconsin and Greater Milwaukee Green Parties. Martin serves as Program Director of Peace Action Wisconsin, and initiated the Milwaukee Bring the Troops Home Referendum Campaign and the Wisconsin Peace Voter Campaign. Martin also serves as National Co-Chair of United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ), the U.S.s largest peace coalition with more than 1,400 organizations. He visited Iraq in 2004 on a fact-finding mission where he personally witnessed the plight of the Iraqi people and U.S. troops

At the close of 2006, Martin was given a Lifetime Peacemaker Award by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, and was honored on December 6th in the U.S. House of Representatives in a statement read by Gwen Moore, Representative to Congress from the 4th Congressional district. Martin has appeared on every major U.S. television network, C-Span, CNN, BBC and Democracy Now to speak against the War in Iraq, as well as countless radio and television stations around the world.

Kit Evans-Ford

Argrow “Kit” Evans-Ford was born in the small town of Mebane, North Carolina. Her passion for nonviolence and peace stems from her work experience with the National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere since the age of 14. She is a 2004 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a B.A. in Communications Studies and African and Afro-American Studies.

Ms. Evans-Ford also holds a M.A. in Teaching: Special Education and a M.A. in Social Justice and Community Development. Kit is a 2004 Teach for America Washington, DC alumni as well as a 2008 Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Her studies and work experience have been centered around gender equality, nonviolence and peace, special education, domestic sex tracking, HIV and AIDS, healing, spirituality, and the performing arts.

Ms. Evans-Ford earned a Master of Divinity degree at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA. While attending seminary she completed a summer fellowship with Pace e Bene. Her work included giving voice to the hurt, healing, and power that comes from survivors of violence and other peacemakers. She has since led and co-led many Pace e Bene workshops.

Kit is also the founder of Testimonies of Hope an Intercultural Christian Devotional. She lives in Rock Island, IL with her husband Dwight Ford.

Rev. Lennox Yearwood

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., a Pace e Bene board member, is a minister, community activist and organizer, and one of the most influential people in Hip Hop political life. Rev. Yearwood works tirelessly to encourage the Hip Hop generation to utilize its political and social voice. He currently serves as President and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, a national, award-winning organization that engages young people in elections, policymaking, and service. He is also a current board member of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

Rev. Yearwood works with celebrities and athletes to engage them in projects that transform communities. He was a co-creator of the 2004 campaign “Vote or Die” with Sean “Diddy” Combs. He was also the Political and Grassroots Director for Russell Simmons in 2003 and 2004, and a Senior Consultant to Jay Z’s “Voice Your Choice” campaign. In 2008 he created the “Respect My Vote” voter mobilization campaign with Platinum Grammy winning recording artists T.I. and Keyshia Cole.

Rev. Yearwood is known for his activist work as the National Director of the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign, in which he organized a coalition of national and grassroots organizations to advocate for the rights of Hurricane Katrina survivors. He led the first march in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in November 2005, to protest the racial profiling of survivors in the days after the storm. The march led to convictions of officers who denied basic human rights to African-American families. The following year the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign successfully pushed back FEMA’s preemptive temporary housing evictions of Katrina Survivors, through public mobilization, two marches in Washington, DC, testimony to Congress, and a public relations campaign. This work earned the Hip Hop Caucus the prestigious 30th Annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.

Rev. Yearwood is also an important leader in the peace movement as an outspoken critic of America’s wars abroad. He was an Officer and Chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve when he first spoke out against the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. In 2007 he led a national “Make Hip Hop Not War” Tour, linking the issues of the wars abroad with the violence in urban communities at home.

Rev. Yearwood has taken the environmental movement by storm. Van Jones, author of the Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, has called Rev. Yearwood the Hip Hop Generation’s version of Dr. King. In 2009, the Hip Hop Caucus launched the “Green the Block” campaign from the West Wing of the White House, with partner organization Green For All. Rev. Yearwood helped climate activist and author, Bill McKibben, organize an international day of Climate Action called 350.org. They co-authored the article “People, Let’s Get Our Carbon Down”.

Rev. Yearwood, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of the District of Columbia in 1998 and was awarded a Master of Divinity from Howard University in 2002. He was elected to student government president at both schools.

Rev. Yearwood has been seen on CNN, BET, MTV, BBC, C-Span, Fox Business,PBS, Hardball with Chris Mathews, and featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, VIBE, the Source, the Nation Magazine, and many other mainstream, progressive, and Hip Hop publications. He is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and can be heard often on NPR. He was named one of Utne Magazine’s “50 Visionaries”, The Source Magazine’s “Power 30”, and a top ten contemporary African-American thinker by the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine.

Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly is a long time peace activist, author, lecturer, and co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. A nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Kathy Kelly has journeyed fourteen times to Afghanistan since 2010, where she has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and other Voices activists have been guests of the Afghan Peace Volunteers. They share in common a belief that “where you stand determines what you see.” Kelly and her companions insist that the U.S. has not been waging a “humanitarian war” in Afghanistan and that the U.S. should pay reparations for the suffering caused in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kelly has also joined with activists around the country to protest drone warfare by holding demonstrations outside of U.S. military bases in Nevada, upstate New York, and, most recently, at Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri. Kathy recently completed a 3-month sentence in federal prison for attempting to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter about drone warfare to the commander of Whiteman.

From 1996 – 2003, Kathy and other Voices activists organized 70 delegations to Iraq that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicine to children and families in Iraq. Kathy and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing. They have also lived alongside people during warfare in Gaza, Lebanon, Bosnia and Nicaragua.

Kathy advocates the use of nonviolent civil disobedience to push for change. In 1988 she was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites, and in 2004, she spent three months in prison for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980. She writes regularly for CommonDreams.org and is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Rev. John Dear

John Dear is a long time peace activist, lecturer, author, priest and organizer. He has spent over three decades speaking to people around the world about the Gospel of Jesus, the way of nonviolence and the call to make peace. He has served as the director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization in the United States, and after September 11, 2001, as one of the Red Cross coordinators of chaplains at the Family Assistance Center, and counseled thousands of relatives and rescue workers. He has worked in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and community centers; traveled in warzones around the world, including Iraq, Palestine, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, India, and Colombia; lived in El Salvador, Guatemala and Northern Ireland; been arrested over 75 times in acts of civil disobedience against war; and spent eight months in prison for a Plowshares disarmament action. In the 1990s, he arranged for Mother Teresa to speak to various governors to stop the death penalty. He moved to New Mexico in 2002 where he served as pastor of several churches, founded Pax Christi New Mexico, and organized an annual peace vigil for nuclear disarmament at Los Alamos for Hiroshima Day.

His thirty books include Living Peace, The Nonviolent Life, Lazarus Come Forth, The God of Peace, Jesus the Rebel, Disarming the Heart, Peace Behind Bars, The Questions of Jesus, You Will Be My Witnesses, Our God Is Nonviolent, The Sound of Listening, Seeds of Nonviolence, Walking the Way, Thomas Merton Peacemaker, Transfiguration, Mary of Nazareth, and his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. They have been translated into ten languages. He has edited books about Daniel Berrigan, Mohandas Gandhi, Mairead Maguire, Henri Nouwen, Richard McSorley and Horace McKenna. He is on the staff of Pace e Bene and www.campaignnonviolence.org. A former Jesuit, he was ordained in 1993 and is now a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Monterey, California. He has two Master’s Degrees in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union in California, and has taught theology at Fordham University.

John Dear has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Sun, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and elsewhere. For many years, he wrote a weekly blog for the National Catholic Reporter, and is featured regularly on the national radio show “Democracy Now!” and the Huffington Post. He is the subject of the DVD documentary, “The Narrow Path” (with music by Joan Baez and Jackson Browne) and is profiled in John Dear On Peace, by Patti Normile (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2009). He has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize, including by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and this year, by the International Parliament for Safety and Peace (based in Rome, Italy). See: www.johndear.org

Ken Butigan

Ken Butigan is Pace e Bene’s Campaign Nonviolence Strategist. A peace and justice worker, workshop facilitator, and writer for two decades, Ken also teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.

Since the early 1980s, Ken has worked with numerous social movements, including movements for a nuclear-free future, an end to homelessness, and freedom for East Timor. He was the national coordinator of the Pledge of Resistance and a national organizer for the Declaration of Peace. Ken joined the Pace e Bene staff in 1990. He developed and for several years directed Pace e Bene’s From Violence To Wholeness program, and was actively involved in creating Pace e Bene’s Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living program.

Ken earned his Ph.D. in the Historical and Cultural Studies of Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in 2000. He has been a lecturer in the spirituality and practice of nonviolence at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, and directed the Spiritual Life Institute at Saint Martin’s College in Washington State for three years.